Printing of electronics, especially on flexible substrates, pursues electronic components and applications for logistical solution, disposable electronics, even to printed displays. Nowadays, the printed electronics applications utilize methods familiar in traditional manufacture of electronic components such as electroplating and screen printing. Unfortunately, these methods are slow, not well suitable for porous substrates and/or substrates in web form. Also flexo and rotogravure printing has been used to print electronic components. Problems with these above mentioned known solutions are that they create structures with discontinuity (due to 20 halftone dots), solvent evaporation and absorption of components in porous structures (with liquid materials). The main challenge with conductive polymers are insufficient electric conductivity and protection against effects of environment e.g. oxidation.
In addition, several techniques for printing conductive patterns using conductive pastes, gels and inks are known. However there are some problems in the known techniques for printing the conductive patterns. Application of liquid-phase materials is undesirable due to their complex processing and relatively low conductivities and/or resolution of the printed traces. Removal of the solvents or auxiliary agents initially included in the composition requires time consuming steps.
The known solutions referred to above set certain limits to substrates which can be used these known solutions. None of them is well suitable for paper, fibrous web, board substrates or the like due to very high temperatures or substrate-weakening local compression used. On the other hand, deposition masks, stencils or xreens are not desirable as far as speed, customizability and flexibility of the process is aimed at, since they make the deposition process unnecessarily complex and limit the obtainable resolution.